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by bheadmaster 871 days ago
It is interesting to me that none of the new NodeJS alternatives support multithreading. Why is that?

Is it just a side-effect of using V8 engine for the heavy lifting, or is it some part of the ECMAScript specification which forbids multithreaded implementations of the language?
2 comments
epolanski 871 days ago
Multithreading is achieved through workers and the event based architecture, it's not the same, but we should rather discuss the pros/cons of it.
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bheadmaster 871 days ago
Pros: Vertical scalability.

Cons: All your async code becomes full of data races.

I suppose adding multithreading to the Node ecosystem would be as hard (if not harder) than removing GIL from Python. At least Python has locking primitives. Node, as far as I know, has none.

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dvlsg 871 days ago
> Node, as far as I know, has none.

Atomics are probably the closest. https://v8.dev/features/atomics

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meowtimemania 871 days ago
In what cases would you want multi-threading in javascript?

I feel like most performance intensive nodejs modules drop down to c++ where real concurrency already exists. (e.g. sharp - https://sharp.pixelplumbing.com/api-utility#concurrency)

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bheadmaster 870 days ago
> In what cases would you want multi-threading in javascript?

In all of them - JavaScript is mostly used for asynchronous programs, which are easily parallelizable. There's no reason not to want multi-threading.

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